Following months of previews and testing, IBM released in open beta the most complete version of its next-generation Stinger database software Monday.

Looking to slingshot past the competition with new features and better performance, Big Blue officials said the latest DB2 Universal Database goes beyond what rivals Microsoft and Oracle offer with their respective SQL Server and 10g products. The software is also the latest iteration of its kind for underscoring IBM's on-demand computing
initiative to provide access to information anytime from anywhere.

For example, Paul Rivot, director of database services and business
intelligence software at IBM, said the new software features more of IBM's
self-managing, autonomic computing features than in any previous versions of
DB2 Universal Database, helping them vault ahead of the competition.

"We believe that the autonomic capabilities that get the system up are far
advanced compared to both Oracle as well as Microsoft," Rivot said.

Automated database management, which Oracle and
Microsoft offer in varying degrees, helps lower
total-cost-of-ownership by freeing up database administrators (DBA) to
attend to other tasks, such as such as data analysis, Web Services,
integration, or information lifecycle management.

The new DB2 Design Advisor allows administrators to automatically set up,
deploy and maintain DB2 on the fly, and tunes the database as the workload
oscillates, ordering changes, backups and restores. The tool also suggests
how complex queries can be accelerated, providing the shortest path to the
requested information.

Chief among these features that let the database "learn" about changes and
adjust, is a new query optimization technology
from IBM's LEO (learning optimizer) research and development project. LEO
renders queries without human intervention, allowing DB2 to automatically
update query statistics about where it keeps information and how it is
performing.

Rivot said products from Microsoft and Oracle force DBAs to constantly tell
the database how to optimize queries.

"Our optimizer technology and LEO is much more advanced, especially on
Oracle -- you have to keep giving their optimizer hints and tips on what to
do," Rivot said. Another tool, Autonomic Object Maintenance, adjusts tables
and backs up data instantly after a DBA programs it to do its maintenance.

IBM is also offering support for three-dimensional geospatial data with a
tool called the DB2 Geodetic Extender, which renders "location" and "time
and space" models of data to give programmers a better idea of how their
data is mapped on a system.

Spatial data could be stored data that maps coordinates. "Say you wanted to
go from my house to your house," Rivot said. "You can get online and put my
address in and your address in and then it comes up with a map on how to get
there. What it does is take the coordinates in the data and shows you
visually."

For example, the city of San Francisco uses DB2 to map where different
crimes occur. New 3D geospatial data improves on that
capability. Business intelligence applications, Rivot explained, are
increasingly using spatial data. The DB2 Geodetic Extender treats the Earth
like a globe, whereas 10g and SQL treat it like a flat map, he claimed.

The Armonk, N.Y. company has also made strides in optimizing DB2 for
application development. For example, Rivot said Stinger offers new tools
that take advantage of the latest application development features of Java/Eclipse and Microsoft .NET.

As previously announced, Stinger has the ability to write stored procedures using .NET languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. By supporting Microsoft Common Language
Runtime (CLR), "we are actually further along than Microsoft is."

Stinger, which supports Linux 2.6 and 64-bit computing to help IBM's database clusters scale higher and perform faster, will also provide enhanced support for Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) to ensure easier integration of Web Services
within the database.

Lastly, Stinger boasts improved availability through DB2 Client Reroute, a mechanism for keeping the software running despite scheduled maintenance, or
if a database server fails. The tool switches users over to a mirrored
database without disruption.

"Most of these capabilities that we talk about here are leveraging
everything from some of the big customers that want to take advantage of
these, but also what we find is that a lot of the autonomic capabilities are
very critical to our small and medium business accounts," Rivot told
internetnews.com.

To that end, DB2 -- Express, a midmarket version of Stinger, will take five
minutes to install and about another 10 minutes to run configuration
advisors to get the system, up, tuned and maintaining itself.

Stinger, for which an official name has not been decided, will become
available to the public later this year.